watchfrr is a watchdog program that monitors the status of supplied frr daemons and tries to restart them in case they become unresponsive or shut down.

To determine whether a daemon is running, it tries to connect to the daemon's VTY UNIX stream socket, and send echo commands to ensure the daemon responds. When the daemon crashes, EOF is received from the socket, so that watchfrr can react immediately.

In order to avoid restarting the daemons in quick succession, you can supply the -m and -M options to set the minimum and maximum delay between the restart commands. The minimum restart delay is recalculated each time a restart is attempted. If the time since the last restart attempt exceeds twice the value of -M, the restart delay is set to the value of -m, otherwise the interval is doubled (but capped at the value of -M).

The following 3 options specify scripts that watchfrr uses to perform start/stop/restart actions. Reasonable default values are built into watchfrr, so the use of these options should no longer be necessary:

Prior versions of watchfrr supported some additional options that no longer exist::

-a, -A, -e, -R, -z

The -a, -A and -R options were used to select alternate monitoring modes that offered different patterns of restarting daemons. The "correct" mode (phased restart) is now the default. The -e and -z options used to disable some monitoring aspects, watchfrr now always has all monitoring features enabled.

Removing these options should result in correct operation, if it does not please file a bug report.

This man page is intended to be a quick reference for command line options. The definitive document is the info file frr 7.3 or the documentation available on the project website at https://frrouting.org/.